This invention relates to video conferencing systems. More particularly, this invention relates to computer-generated images for shared viewing and manipulation on a video conferencing broadcast display monitor.
To enter a virtual reality environment, users must put on video display goggles and body position sensors. Their hands and/or bodies appear as a virtual image in the virtual reality environment, and can manipulate virtual objects in that environment as seen through their goggles. Multiple users can appear before one another as virtual persons in a single virtual reality environment. Users from remote distant locations can thereby have virtual meetings in that virtual environment, and view and manipulate virtual information and three-dimensional objects. Still, the participants cannot interact with each other as in a real face-to face meeting.
While virtual reality meetings may be common among networked virtual reality video games, video conferencing is the commonly accepted norm for conducting face-to-face meetings of business people between distant remote locations. The participants see real images of other participants at remote locations, but cannot readily share data or manipulate virtual objects as in virtual reality environments.
Still, many multi-national corporations use video conferencing systems to provide low-cost face-to-face meetings between colleagues at distant locations. To enhance communications at those meetings, some video conferencing systems permit computer generated images or presentations to be simultaneously broadcast to participants either in a pop-up window or as an alternate switchable display on the video monitors. Lately, enhancements to this have been provided for video conferencing over the Internet that permits the manipulation by distant participants of computer-generated documents, spreadsheets or drawings displayed in the separate pop-up window. While the sharing of such information enhances the communicative exchange at such video conferences, it does not replace actual meetings where detailed information concerning complex three-dimensional objects must be shared.